De los álamos vengo, madre,de ver cómo los menea el aire

THERE'S A PROBLEMATIC DIALECTIC in poetry (I associate it with Ron Silliman) between language poetry and the "School of Quietude." I think it's analogous to that set up in the first quarter of the previous century between the followers of Schoenberg and those of Stravinsky. It's a trap, this dialectic, and I fall into it all the time.

Now here's my friend (I wish we were closer; we're too far apart, spatially) Alvaro Cardona-Hine who sends me among other things his delicious little Spring Has Come (Albuquerque: La Alameda Press, 2000), a collection, as its subtitle puts it, of Spanish Lyrical Poetry from the Songbooks of the Renaissance.

It's deceptive and disarming, this collection, chastely set out, often simply a couplet on a page, his translation below, lots of white space:

En aquella peña, en aquella,
que no caben en ella.


In that hillock, that one,
there's no room for so many.

His introduction investigates the interesting controversy among scholars, beginning a century ago, as to the origin of these lyrics, and proceeds to allude to that marvelous moment in cultural history when christians, moors, and jews (my downcase is meant merely to propose egalitarianism, making common what is proper) lived together peaceably in what I just read somewhere else is truly a convivium, a much nicer word than similar greek terms too bound to the kind of partying restricted to the wealthy (symposium comes to mind).

These lyrics, Alvaro proposes, have deep roots; and I respond they probably always existed. He suggests the couplet quoted above was sung spontaneously by a farm woman. Perhaps: man or woman, the singer was probably out in the fields, and probably had that hillock, or those hillocks, the real one and the metaphorical, in view.

Daniel Wolf implied the other day a divide in music between that which

Borrowing a bit from linguistics, there are basically two ways of creating novelty: the first is to create new, never-before-uttered expressions that are, nevertheless, entirely competent expressions within the received language, its lexicon, and its rules; the second is to create expressions which are, under the terms of of the received language, non-competent, if not impossible. The choice is between saying something which simply has not been said and heard before and saying something which was heretofore impossible to say or hear. The histories of repertoire in music, art, poetry, etc. are marked by a certain oscillation between the two.

and I've been thinking about that, too; it's one of the traps that I fall into all the time, not that it matters except that when you're in a trap you (by which I mean I) don't get any work done.

(And that's just one of the divides; let's not even think about the one between both the musics Daniel mentions and the greater body of music which doesn't concern itself at all with "creating novelty," but is perfectly willing to go on endlessly repeating the past.)

Some time ago I opened a lecture, ostensibly a reading of Wallace Stevens,

I am committed to two notions often thought to be mutually exclusive: regionalism and modernism.

which is of course another idiotic dialectical trap (the lecture was an escape from it: it's in my book , even recent cultural history, commas included in the title, book available at Frog Peak Press, please order a copy).

Clearly the singer of that lyric about the hillock was a regionalist, not a modernist; modernists don't work in the fields. We'd all hoped postmodernism would get us past these distinctions, or to be a little more precise get us past the fences around such distinctions; would at least build little stiles permitting field-hands to hop across into libraries, and scholars to find their way back to the fields.

Well, as Alvaro promises in that title, floating over his oddly attractive Spanish Woman (for, yes, he's a painter, too, a gifted one), Spring has come, postmodernism arrived not without its own problematic wars but we've most of us weathered them, and can now find "novelty" in musics and poems and paintings and even examples of scholarship which might once have seemed, well, Quiescent.

I spent a couple of hours yesterday digitizing old tapes, and made a CD for myself of the result. It includes:

Four Mahler songs: Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen; Ich atmet' einen linden Duft; Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder; and Revelge
Dallapiccola: Concerto per la notte di natale dell'anno 1956
Shin-ichi Matsushita: Canzone da sonare
and an unknown piece for orchestra,

twenty-two minutes long, spare and unpredictable, full of the kind of ambiguity Wolf discussed in a paragraph noted below (Aug. 28), the once-seeming-important distinctions of surface and depth so fully resolved as to be rendered not only meaningless but incomprehensible. I listen to it now, wondering what that last piece is, and who discovered the sounds and wrote something out to allow others to hear them.

The four pieces make a completely satisfying CD. Its sounds emerge from a collection begun over forty years ago, and last visited nearly twenty: but the sounds clearly engraved themselves into some part of my person, setting synapses so strong as to snap back at the least encouragement. Are these too traps from which to emerge? Or fences whose divisions must be overcome?

Do these sounds sing quietly and insidiously like the remembered (consciously or not) songs that have floated around in Spain since the days of the Iberians, songs that wind up in, among other places, music like Joaquín Rodrigo's Cuatro madrigales amatorios? That piece delighted me long ago when I discovered it among the commissioning series put out by the Louisville Orchestra; it proved that those ancient lyrics could find fresh expression and material even then, fifty years ago, in the heart of Modernism.

De los alamos vengo, madre...

I hear those lines so often, looking across my own fields toward my own young poplar.

And to close once again with Alvaro's translation:

Gavilán de noche,
¿qué viento corre?



Hawk, you that fly with the night,
is it windy?

¿cómo los menea el aire; how's the wind blowing?

Dr. Williams was right

so i'm sitting in the car in the parkinglot
lindsey having gone into tj's to get some selenium
the radio's listening to a callin talkshow about photography
someone wants to know What about camera phones
what are they doing to photography
outside i notice the chance encounter of a dumpster and a shoppingcart
there's your answer

Repoussoir

RENEWABLE MUSIC, Daniel Wolf's admirable blog, continues to stimulate me every time I tune in. Most recently:

One of the qualities I most value in the radical music tradition is its loss of certainty (even ambiguity) about a surface and depth distinction. ... what, precisely, is the surface in The Well-Tuned Piano or Drumming or Navigations for Strings? Is it the notes on the page or those physically struck on the instruments, or is it the the sounds produced directly by those actions, or is it the cloud of combination and resultant tones and interference patterns and acoustical beating? In many cases, this uncertainty or ambiguity goes even further, with distinctions between musical, psychoacoustical, and physical parameters constantly in play...

In response, here are my Variations for brass, percussion, or piano (or organ), composed I don't remember when, based on a star atlas, and premiered by solo harp. (It found its way into the second movement of Tongues, where it established a mood of rural nocturne.)

This is, I see, a pretty bad photograph. The score's in ink on translucent paper, twenty inches square or so, and wrinkled. In the photo it's more an aerial view of a curious desert than an earthbound view of the stars, but maybe that's what happens in time.

Last night's lunar eclipse brings all this to mind; perhaps that's what Wolf was thinking of, too, though one doesn't know if he saw it, a third the world away. It was a night of interrupted sleep and half-waking thoughts:

Lunar Eclipse

Bad luck, they say, to count remaining teeth—
you're sure to lose another—let alone
the years you've lived. But there it was, last week,
another birthday: now six dozen years.
It's Sunday morning, if dozens are days,
or Saturday, depends on where you start,
in either case an easy-starting day,
nothing to do but what I will. It may
turn out gentle, productive, lazy, fast,
painful or comfortable. Won't know 'til it's done.

I think of George, big George, a man as big
a his American refrigerator.
Maddeningly slow but stately as he steps
into the bar to buy his cigarettes
or walks the aisles of his supermarket
filling his cart with oysters by the kilo,
butter, a little milk, to make the stew
he liked at breakfast. Or when he arrived
exhausted by the flights from Jakarta,
Nice, Paris, to spend Thanksgiving
with us here in Healdsburg, and already
though we didn't know it on his way
to an accelerating death from too much life
his prostate cancer adding its slow work.

I listen to the gentle steady breath
of the strange woman lying next to me,
strange because, after these fifty years
unknowable though comfortably known.
she asks if I was carrying flowers
or if she dreamed it, and I remember
thinking to take some roses to the office
when we went to see the doctor. As
somebody did twelve years ago in Oakland.
Now I think of it I think that it
was I, roses from our Berkeley garden
flowers for the receptionist, the nurses,
especially Stephanie, slender, light-skinned,
regal chiseled beauty, grave, serious,
the bones i think of as Somalian,
Stephanie who said to trust my wife,
and yes it's good to read Epicurus,
especialy the letter to Menoeceus.

She stirs. I dreamed you took some flowers, and said
something was happening at five o'clock.
I was thinking of George, I told her,
and I set the clock for five o'clock
our brains are going crazy; all our thoughts
are getting ready to leave our bodies
and bump among the stars.

     Four-thirty now.
The moon is coming back. Perhaps I'll sleep.

Baseball and Boulette's

A DAY AT THE BALL PARK, even if your team loses, is better than a day away from the park; only a day of tramping in the countryside can beat it; books are for rainy days. (So's blogging.) And so it was that we went, this week, to AT&T Park, as it's called this month, to see our beloved Cubs pick up two out of three from the cellar-lodging Giants.

Baseball and eating. I can think of no better way of spending a day than by strolling down to the Ferry Building to have a leisurely breakfast at Boulette's Larder, then stroll on further to the ball park to catch batting practice and the game, lunching on whatever you find—the food's really not at all bad. And then, after the game, which preferably your team has won (though that was alas not the case), to have a Martini, a hamburger, and a Caesar salad at Zuni.

What should we find at Boulette's yesterday but a reprint of a cartoon that appeared nearly twenty years ago, in 1989, after someone broke into our house (we lived then in Berkeley) and stole Lindsey's purse, which contained among other things her working recipe book.

But let me tell you about Boulette's. It's in the southwest corner of the Ferry Building, open to the east where it looks out on the Bay toward Yerba Buena Island. There are a few tables for two and four outside, and also in the hall of the Ferry Building outside the shop's own door; but the best place to sit, I think, is at the big table, perhaps five people at each side with plenty of room so that you don't at all mind eating with strangers.

I like this kind of communal table: it's more civilized than eating at a bar; gives a solitary diner company; and lets a couple entertain themselves with sly observations of the others, or by striking up a conversation that will likely never be continued.

And Boulette's kitchen, which is where you're eating, is light and airy, clean and visually interesting, full of detail and, of course, the busy staff at stoves and counters, fixing tea and coffee, baking, cooking eggs—all those things that are so fascinating to contemplate. Not to mention the scents, of course: a wonderful potpourri.

We just bought a copy of Patty Unterman's San Francisco Food Lover's Pocket Guide (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2007), a very convenient 200-page compilation of notices and reviews of bakeries, bars, butchers, delis, markets, cafés, cheese shops, confectoners, food stands, cookware and cookbook shops, wine shops, and of course restaurants in San Francisco and environs. A quick look confirms its usefulness: it's small enough to fit in purse or pocket (just over 5x7 and a half inch thick); and cross-indexed by location, expense, cuisine, features, and so on. Stick with its general index, though: Boulette's does not show up among restaurants, though that's what I think it is; instead it's listed as a delicatessen/takeout—which is what it also is.

I'll let you look at Boulette's website rather than try to reproduce the menu here. It's daunting to try to describe it in a few words: the menu—"list" is a better word, because so much is available to take home with you—is varied and thoughtful, ranging from confit to canalé—salads, main courses, desserts, jams and whatnot. Hell: let Patty describe it: I'm sure she won't mind my quoting

Using only organic ingredients, Amaryll Schwertner, one of the Bay Area's most original and principled cooks, and her crew prepare building blocks for fine, home-cooked meals. If you don't want to cook yourself, each day brings a new menu of take-home dinners, such as a crab pudding soufflé—or, you can eat there at one fantastic wooden communal table. The breakfast is divine.

What I had, in fact, was a French-press pot of Blue Bottle coffee and a bowl of barley with a poached egg and shiitake mushrooms; Lindsey had a plate of delicious toast with three jams (apricot, blackberry, fig); and we had an amazing soy-and-melon-and-melonseed beverage, a sort of smoothie.

And then we took home a box of cookies—beautifully boxed and wrapped; the cookies themselves covered with a sheet of fine paper; and the cookies absolutely perfect: variously crunchy, creamy, evanescently powdery, leading up to a couple of splendid salt-chocolate brownieish cookies as good as any I've tasted.

Oh. And the canalé? Lindsey knows these pastries, of course; Jean-Pierre always talked about them, two scant inches across and three high, crisp and dark on the outside, soft and creamy inside, a little like a popover, but really nothing but themselves. I suppose they're channelled—canalisé—or extruded, almost, from their baking molds. They're labor-intensive. I only know two places to get them, Ken's in Portland (Oregon) and Boulette's. But Portland doesn't have big-league baseball.

Music in the night

ANOTHER ONE OF THOSE nice dreams: sitting at a piano with a couple of teenaged students who were picking out tunes. I suggested the pickupnote, and the tail of the opening three-bar phrase; then the tune just kept going on.

I think the lyrics would begin “I don't know why...”(or maybe “how”), but it was useful this morning to remember a short shopping list: four limes and toasted almonds...

A History of European Art Music, 1

The decor and tensility of Couperin
The pomp and glory of Rameau.
The bourgeois masterly Bach.
The worldly resourceful Handel.
The wit and cleverness of Haydn.
The humanity of Mozart.
The innigkeit and belligerence of Beethoven.
The scope and sorrow of Schubert.
The ardor and sincerity of Mendelssohn.
The fierce delicacy of Chopin.
The ardor and urgency of Schumann.
The austere depravity of Berlioz.
The languor and impetuousness of Berlioz.
The manipulation and deceit of Wagner.
The birdsong and cathedrals of Bruckner.
The marches and anxieties of Mahler.
The transcendent plainness of Ives.
The sensuous intelligence of Debussy.
The voluptuous cruelty of Ravel.
The sweet skeptical seriousness of Satie.
The precise lyricism of Webern.
The invention and humor of Cage.

Edges

Lindsey among the Matisses






THOUGHTS OF MORTALITY crowd the aging mind; I'm sorry; I can't help it. Not even an unusually distracting week seems to keep them away—not Molière thumbing his nose in Ashland, not the Boston Red Sox losing pathetically in Seattle, not the serenity of an hour's walk in Castle Crags, not the sweet pleasures of stone fruit at Andy Mariani's orchard, not the steely edge of a Martini with a newly discovered gin (made in Portland, I forget the name), not the pleasures of the table and good company at Incanto out on Church Street.

Especially not Matisse, whose bronzes anchor an oddly troubling exhibition at SFMOMA. You can't argue with these pieces; they're great articulations in the history of Modernist sculpture, only slightly damaged by comparison with a couple of greater Degas pieces in the same rooms. And I don't even cavil at the curatorship, eager though it is to explain things, to draw inferences, to assume certainties, to insist on linearities.

Years ago a tiny bright woman who was then a public relations officer at the University Art Museum gave me one of the great lessons in the laughably casual education I was piecing together in the visual arts when she mentioned even more casually that she always fastened on the edges in paintings. Edges; profiles; contours: they exist in only two dimensions, meaning they have no substantial existence at all; yet they define, link, and clarify.

Matisse was a fine draughtsman, like Picasso; his contour drawings are both masterly and affecting. It is a defiance to trace a line; the audacity of drawing is breathtaking. I think Matisse kneaded his clay in penance, denying himself the cruel pleasure of the pencil's inspired aggression, its cheeky assertion of his gifts.

Several times the wall narratives suggest these sculptures are best seen in the round, while traveling round them. A point hardly worth stating, you'd think: yet surprisingly few visitors seemed to be doing this while we were there. They seemed to spend about as much time reading labels as looking at sculpture—and those with headphones seemed often to be focussing on nothing, gazing into near space while listening to whatever secret sounds were thankfully theirs alone.

Walking around a sculpture is how I like to see it; often walking slowly around with one eye closed, concentrating on the constantly changing edge between the sculpture and its space. Walking around the sculpture I myself am drawing, or at least assisting in an act of drawing, dragging, pulling the constantly changing edge into a contour drawing in four dimensions, height, horizontal distance from the sculpture's center, constantly changing acceleration in the direction of my own footsteps; and time, of course. Drawing, contour drawing, in time.

If architecture is frozen music, as Goethe said, then sculpture is pregnant with music. It's a long time since I've kneaded any clay, but I think Matisse, and Degas, and the private Rodin, when they were shaping their dimensional drawings in clay, were occupying time in an essentially musical—better, composerly—way. By that I mean a non-teleological way: time occupied not in order to arrive at the conclusion of some premeditated process, but as reflection on experiences and productions that have gone before, as contemplation of the possibility of some unforeseen eventuality which will nonetheless turn out to take its place within an organically logical system, you might say, identifiable in some way with both the material and the person.

Music and the production of sculpture: constant reconfigurations of material: life and the passage of time. That's what I meant by "mortality." On the whole, as I told Lindsey the other day, I think mortality is a good idea. And in any case I have very little to say about it; it is a constant, a given.

Some of this thinking is probably triggered by the recent deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangeo Antonioni; more by the recent deaths of two people I knew, not as well as I'd like to have: Ned Paynter, who was on the news staff at KPFA when I was there more than forty years ago, and Marvin Tartak, gentle and witty pianist and accompanist par excellence.

When death comes to mind—and death is never far from contemplations of mortality—I always think of three things. Mozart, of course:

As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such close relations with this best and truest friend of mankind, that his image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very soothing and consoling!

and Duchamp:

Besides, when someone dies, it's always someone else...

and, to put beside these essentially Epicurean views of the subject, this poem by Lincoln Fitzell, which has quietly whispered to me for nearly fifty years:

PRAYER

Earth the mother, earth the death,
We owe to you this tragic breath,
And dark and wide if we should fall,
We pray that you may keep us all
More gently sleepers of your night,
Than we were children of your light.

Mozart: letter to his father, 4 April 1787, translation by Emily Anderson
Duchamp: aphorism, found also on his tombstone, as I recall and translate (probably faultily)
Fitzell: "Prayer," in Selected Poems (Denver: Alan Swallow, 1955)
gin: Cascade Mountain from Bendistillery (thanks, Giovanna)

Tartuffe in Ashland

THE COUNTRY'S SECOND-FAVORITE PLAY
This year? Moliere's Tartuffe, they say.
Second most frequently produced,
That is, and now its wit is loosed
On Ashland's public, and they see
That lust and greed, hypocrisy,
And false religion can be fun.
Depends on where and when they're done.
Heroic couplets, stylish sets,
Elegant costumes—no regrets
At seeing Moliere's play once more.
Trenchant satire's never a bore.

Fernet Branca

photo: Rome, January 2004

AH, FERNET BRANCA. The first time we traveled in Europe, in 1974, we traveled with another couple, who we met in Chiomonte, whence we went on by train to Torino, where we rented a tiny car.

We drove to Milan, where we had a long long lunch—I must write about that one day—and then George (who drove very quickly) drove us all up to Bellagio, where we planned to stay a day or two. As the road climbed I began to suffer from that long long lunch. I rolled from one side of the back seat to the other as he careened around curves on the climb toward Como.

I was beginning to feel sick. Finally I insisted that he stop in the next village, at the next cafe. I staggered into the bar and bought a bottle of Fernet Branca. Back in the car, I took a swallow or two and felt better immediately.

When we got to Bellagio I was ready for dinner.

Since then I have never traveled without a small flask. Years ago Eric even made a wallet card for me, which I still carry always. It has a drawing of a pig on it, and nicely lettered across the drawing the legend

MANGIATORE
nel caso d'emergenzia,
Prego di Somministrare
FERNET

There's a good article on Fernet Branca on Wikipedia, with a surprising revelation about San Francisco. I can vouch for the fact that the American and Italian versions of Fernet Branca are different, and I much prefer the Italian version. (Fernet is much cheaper in Italy, by the way; I used often to buy a bottle there at the duty-free shop when coming home, but current restrictions have made this impossible.)

The combination of Fernet Branca and a very popular American cola beverage sounds unpleasant to me. On the other hand, a Fernetini—three parts gin, one part Fernet Branca, lemon-peel garnish—can be a pleasant thing on certain occasions.

And a shot-glass of Fernet Branca can make a good nightcap. I think I'll have one right now.

But first I opened W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz, and there near the very beginning was a description of an old man in the Antwerp train station drinking Fernet...

The Anxiety of Influence; the reward of contentment

YES, IT'S ONE of the couple hundred books in the case of Books Waiting To Be Read: Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence. Lou Harrison gave me a copy, years ago, one day when I was visiting him, back when I was thinking of writing a life-and-works book about him.

(Count the abandoned projects.)

I haven't read it, partly because the project was abandoned, mostly because I've developed a distaste for Mr. Bloom, a distaste caused by my lack of enthusiasm for John Milton, and by my disagreement with much of what Bloom has to say about Shakespeare. Both of these are poor reasons, and much countervailed by Lou's enthusiasm; I'll have to move the book closer to the top.

It comes to mind today because of today's post on Ron Silliman's blog. He takes up the familiar device of the Top-Ten List. This surfaced a few weeks back on another blog I find interesting, George (it is George, isn't it?) Hunka's Superfluities, where the question was put: what is the most influential play of the last hundred years? (Most of the response seemed to hesitate between Waiting for Godot and The Cherry Orchard.)

Taken as prescriptive, these projects are never much more than Fool's Errands. Taken as descriptive, though, they can be very interesting. Curtis Faville objects, in a comment on Ron's blog, that one's own list of one's own influences can't be trusted; that "The great danger of autobiography is in re-writing your own history to suit your current preferred version of yourself." Well, no written sentence is good for much more than what it makes you add to it; autobiography, like biography, or history, or even recipe-books, is always "suspect," if you have a suspicious turn of mind.

All that said, since I'm back in an autobiographical state of mind, here are the influences that come to mind—influences on my own mind-formation, I mean. If you're not interested in my mind, that's okay, I can understand that, but it may be interesting to see what one person found stimulating in the middle of the last century:

1950s:

jazz

Stein

Finnegans Wake

Four Saints in Three Acts (the opera)

Picasso

Ives

Mahler

1960s:

Cage

Webern

Duchamp

Wallace Stevens

Henry James

Mozart

1970s:

cuisine

Ponge

(Raymond) Roussel

By the 1980s, having nudged well past forty, most of the raw influences—I mean those that one discovers in their informative power for the first time—are in place; they continue to work their mischief but subliminally, and few new enthusiasms come along.

Until 1983, that magic year, when we found this place in the country, and began to build Last House (to borrow M.F.K. Fisher's marvelous name), and finally set aside most ambitions, and began to settle into this Eastside View. Travel and the fitful correspondence with friends provide the new stimuli; re-reading, theater, and contemplation provide context.

Perhaps one's own life, like one's own time, moves into its own postmodernity. One danger continues: the threat of complacency.

Dry Time

THEY SAY OURS IS a "Mediterranean climate," meaning wet winter, dry summer. We had just under a tenth of an inch of rain on Tuesday, very unusual here; enough to sell a little sulfur to the grape growers no doubt, but hardly enough to do much for our poor ornamentals. The Italian cypresses look fine, except for the ragged edges the damn blackbirds and starlings make with their busy commutes; and Lindsey's garden is flourishing, thanks to her frugal driplines.

I'm worried about our pine trees, though. Look at the one in the center of the picture, just beyond my workshop: it's dry and nearly transparent. It's an Italian stone pine; we planted it and three others not in the photo, partly for their wonderful sculpture, partly for their tasty pine nuts. This tree is clearly failing, and I don't know why. I notice another, four or five miles away at the entrance to Rodney Strong Vineyards, is beginning to show the same distress; and I'm not too happy about the appearance of the three pines we planted on the fenceline out of sight to the left of this photo.

The dry weather is normal, and the heat is not really abnormal. It hit close to 100 degrees a few weeks ago, and the low to mid nineties last week; but as they say it's a dry heat and not really enervating. We open all the windows at night and close them first thing in the morning; our concrete floor keeps the house cool; we don't need air conditioning.

Up at the top of the photo, beyond our fenceline, south of our house, that's the neighbor's vineyard. We don't see it from our house; this photo was taken from above, near the fenceline on the other side of our place. From our house we see almost nothing but our own place, and that's how we like it. But Gary's vineyard is only 150 feet from our front door, and what a difference! It's irrigated, of course, green and lush, unlike the sere hillside we call home.

In fact we're surrounded on three sides by these vineyards. This has its advantage: they make a fine firebreak. I used to worry about fires blowing in from the north or east; no longer. But the vineyards bring prosperity, meaning inflated land-values; and the people who own and run these properties are constrained to keep the profits coming in. Rosenblum, our north neighbor, recently subdivided his acreage; a big winery-tasting facility is going up just the other side of our north fence.



I've met the man who owns this winery, and he seems like a nice guy—quiet-spoken, aware of ecological considerations, modest rather than over-ambitious in his plans. But look at the size of this place, and think of the money involved! His backers are going to want to see returns, and however modest his current plans may be there's always the threat that continuing demand for investment return will lead to bigger and more profitable production.

I mentioned Michael Kincaid the other day. Another of his aphorisms:

Agriculture enabled overpopulation; Industrialism made it profitable.

and my old friend John Whiting sums up the result of this "progress" in the working title (I hope he keeps it) of a paper he's polishing for this fall's Oxford Symposium: Eating the Earth.

We do indeed eat the earth, and we must eat it slowly and respectfully enough to allow it to recuperate. We are not the first farmers: Earth is. Earth tends her gardens and her livestock, responding like any farmer to the changing influences of rains and droughts, gullies and deposits. Her time-scale is not ours, it goes without saying. Much of the time her scale is immense, with cause and effect separated by unimaginable (or at least unexperienceable) spans of time.

On other occasions, though, her time-scale is impressively immediate. We had a noticeable earthquake on the Hayward Fault last week; things were broken in Berkeley. A day later there was a smaller quake up this way, near the Geysers, where clusters of small quakes have become commonplace since the city of Santa Rosa began pouring its treated wastewater down nature's steam vents.

I try to keep the cosmic perspective in mind; it eases apprehension. Given enough time, Nature will prevail. There is no right configuration of ice caps, deserts, temperate and torrid zones; only our own desires can qualify one fleeting configuration as "better" than another.

On the other hand... I'm concerned about that pine.

Cenozoic Time; objective poetics

I WROTE ABOUT Michael Kincaid's little book Solar Margins here a few months ago, and the other day a letter arrived from him, with a short poem and some additional — well, what are they, anyway? Aphorisms? Fragments?






An example:

The Ideal has limited rights of pronouncement. There are places its logic cannot go unless it agrees to be a student. (The Ideal is not known for such humility.)

I set this here without Kincaid's permission, and I hope I don't abuse his confidence in a correspondent he's never seen.

The poem he sent, three short couplets called "Down the Cañada," will not appear here; I don't think I should go quite that far. I will quote one line, the third:

Rock mirrors mind.

You can see how it would have made me recall Carl Rakosi's "Cenozoic Time," which appears here as I annotated it into a "song."

(It was sung by soprano Hiroko Yoshinaga, with violinist Akiko Kojima, violin, on March 13, 2004, in Carl's living room.

listen to it

I don't know anything about poetry. That seems astonishing, given a bachelor's degree in English literature: but there it is. I don't know anything about it, and I very much resist learning anything about it in any formal sense. I've always felt you learn most by some kind of osmotic exposure (you can follow the dismal examples in my memoir, whose sales could certainly be better), and it seems to me the best way to learn anything about poetry is to read it.

(I'd focus on Wallace Stevens.)

Carl, who I knew slightly toward the end of his long life, was classified an "Objectivist" by those who know about this sort of thing. William Carlos Williams was apparently the model; Wikipedia will fill you in on the details. It's a sensibility that pleases me: forty years ago when I discovered Francis Ponge, through the Goliard edition of a translation of his Le savon, it was his phenomenology that excited me.

"Cenozoic Time" seems to me about as objective as you can get, but "Down the Cañada" puts that into some question by, as it were, responding to it from a greater measure of detachment. Well, there's a lot to think about here, but it's time to go out to dinner.

Mortal fallacies

TWO INTERESTING CONVERSATIONS are going on within my user group (NCMUG, the North Coast Macintosh Users' Group). One concerns archival inks for inkjet printers. The other laments the possible demise of internet radio due to increased fees requested by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), which wants to raise significantly the royalties levied on the broadcast of copyright material.

The latter discussion connects to another, about the fees demanded by licensing groups like BMI and ASCAP (Broadcast Music Incorporated; American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers) of commercial entities (restaurants, cafés) that present performances or recordings of licensed music in a for-profit context.

All three discussions seem to speak to a common delusion: that the preoccupations of any given Present merit Perpetuity. The worrier about archival ink is an artist, apparently concerned that her work outlast her own life. How many artists, I wonder, are producing graphic work using computers and printers these days? Thousands, I'm sure. Millions of prints, accumulating decade by decade, stacking up alongside all those CDs, DVDs, silver-nitrate negatives, Polaroid prints, shellac and vinyl discs, 35mm transparencies.

Years ago we stood in front of the Maison Carré in Nîmes, marveling not so much at the classic grandeur of the building itself as at its location, nearly a meter below the present-day grade level. I don't think its own weight sank it into the earth: more likely the accumulating detritus of the centuries has raised the city around it. You see this everywhere you study ancient buildings in the Mediterranean countries.

Then there's the concern about copyright, royalties, performance fees and the like. Virgil Thomson had it right: it's the contemporary stuff that should be free of such economic encumbrance, and the more-generally-desired Standard Repertory that should be taxed. If theater companies had to pay royalties to perform Shakespeare, if opera companies had to pay them to produce Verdi, if publishers (and, by extension, libraries, should they continue to exist) had to pay to reprint Austen and Dickens and such); and if fees thereby collected were distributed among living writers and composers, whose own work would be distributed free of royalty...

Why then a current paradox would be resolved: the Past and its glories would be recompensed, the Present and its provisionalities would be supported and published.

On this day, July 12, in 1911, my father was born. His life was difficult, his gifts unresolved and neglected. May he rest in peace.

“That’s one...”

NOTHING MORE INTERESTING than the intersection of ethical quandary with practical quandary. Case in point:

Eating in a restaurant (whose name I will not here divulge) the other night with another couple we find our enjoyment of an excellent wine list and mostly quite good food utterly set to naught by unprofessional service. It all began with our first wine: an unfamiliar white wine from Monferrato (for this Italian restaurant boasts a number of Piemontese wines and dishes).

The waiter brought it, did not really display the label, pulled the cork, poured a small amount into a glass, and offered it to our friend—a man who worked a few years for a well-known wine importer, then waited tables very professionally for many years at one of my favorite restaurants.

Half-jokingly I suggested Lindsey test the wine, as she’s excellent at detecting corked wines. On lifting it to her nose a troubled expression clouded her face, one I’ve seen before. Corked, she said; David, I think you should check this. He lifted the glass to his nose: Corked, he said, No doubt about it. Here, Charles, see what you think.

Why should I try it, I asked; you’ve both already settled it; if you think it’s corked, why wouldn’t I? Still, I held it to my nose. Corked, corked, and corked, no question about it.

The waiter was worried. Are you saying you don’t want this wine, he asked. Yes, David said, we don’t want this wine; it’s corked.

Do you want some other wine, the waiter asked.

Yes, David said, bring another bottle, but of this same wine.

I don’t think I want to do that, the waiter said; You don’t like this wine. But he went disconsolately, carrying the corked wine with him.

After a considerable wait he reappeared with another bottle, displayed its label quickly, and began to uncork it.

Wait a moment, David said, May I see this wine, please? The waiter handed it to him and David held it out in front of him, carefully reading the entire front label, then methodically turning the bottle round to read the entire back label. Very interesting, he said, Thank you; but this is not the wine we ordered; we want another bottle of the wine we first ordered.

I know you do, the waiter said, But I don’t want to bring it; you won’t like it. I tasted that first bottle, it wasn’t corked, you simply don’t like that wine.

David was quite marvelous. I think I’d like to speak to your sommelier, he said slowly and pleasantly; do you have someone here who’s in charge of the wines? The poor waiter trudged away with this new bottle. In time he reappeared, not with a sommelier, but with a second bottle of the wine we’d ordered in the first place. It was fine: not corked at all.

From here on, though, everything related to service went wrong. The first courses took forever to arrive, and when they did arrive one was a wrong dish. The second courses were mispronouncedf—“tajarin,” for example, was pronounced as if it were a Spanish word, not Piemontese—and took even longer, absurdly long. The desserts were served well enough, but for the first time the dishes themselves were not very good.

What was meant to be a rather special evening, our first dinner out with a couple we’ve known and liked for years, was spoiled.

BUT WHERE, you ask, is the ethical/practical problem here? Well, what should I do about this? I feel of course I should address this complaint to the restaurant’s management. Do I do this without specifying date or table, lest the poor service was unusual and should be overlooked? I remember a dinner in Italy, years ago, when our service was even worse than this, and a friend roundly berated the waitress, reducing her to tears; and we found out a week later that the poor woman had just lost a child to some lingering illness.

I’m associated with a restaurant myself, a well-known one: do I complain anonymously, lest the management think I’m simply spiteful? If I reveal myself, will he think I’m concerned about the profession—which I am—or will he think I’m spiteful, or simply looking for some kind of compensation?

How to deal with complaints? I think of the old story about the farmer bringing home a bride on a warm romantic evening. His horse stumbles: That’s one, the farmer says. A couple of silent miles later the horse stumbles again: That’s two, warns the farmer.

The third time the horse stumbles the farmer climbs down from the buggy, gets a rifle out of the trunk behind, steps in front of the buggy and shoots the poor beast.

Zeke, the bride screams, What have you done? He looks at her as he puts the rifle back. That’s one, he says.

Back to the books

Book conversation (among other matters) with two friends led me to look at recent reading notes in the PDA, among which this:

42 (?) affection: = Epicurus’s “inclination”
45 Charyoff!
51 The problem of freedom (cf 72ff)
55, 1st paragraph!
77, sci. freedom overrides demurral (sust. vs. immediate gratification)
79, last paragraphs
79-80 prurience has > e.g. WB’s furtiveness
83, ¶ 1: “flip-flopping” : freedom requires complexity. (this > messiness. Freedom is messy; order is totalitarian.)
Pound: 33 top

94, center
96 unexplainable knowledge
98, last ¶
(Davenport, p 103)
111 critical judgment [implications of social & behavioral criticism]
113 “an expl. is a bucket, not a well.” [much art these days -- minimalist, i.e. -- is explainable.]
115 “the increase of art accounts for the increase of perception.” [so we accelerate because we know more.]

CS: I have no idea what the book was, so you see how useful it is to take reading notes...
EC: You should just publish it; it's a poem.

Now, though, on second reading—and with the help of a Google search for "an explanation is a bucket, not a well"—I see I was reading something of Wendell Berry's. And another quick search in the PDA turns it up: Life is a Miracle (Counterpoint Press, 2001). (Lots of reviews online.) But what the devil Davenport does the note refer to?

Elliott always awakens my bookishness, which sleeps far more than I like these days. In Portland I picked up two little books from Giovanna's wonderful Tower of Books to Read: Robinson, Dave, with Chris Garratt: Introducing Ethics(Totem Books, 2001, ISBN: 9781840460773). Not a serious examination of its subject, sniffs the Library Journal in a review I found on the Amazon website; but it left me with a few notes, reminding me especially that

Postmodernism has accelerated our epistemological crisis. It is difficult now to be confident about the certainty of any human knowledge, especially knowledge about human beings themselves.

And with this I was reading Beard, Mary, with John B. Henderson: Classics: a very short introduction (ISBN: 9780192853851; Oxford University Press, 2000), which closes with

The poet finds modern culture littered with classical ruins, fragments, and jumble. He knows, too, that he is programmed to find this; and he understands that the same is true for every educated person in the West who knows that it is only the backdrop of their cultural past that can provide a frame within which they can situate and recognize themselves.

I know, I know; these are hardly bold new insights. I like their chance encounter, though, by way of two little everyman's vademecums; these were the kind of books that kept the masses in touch with Ideas when I was a child, before mid-20th-century; it's nice to think there's room for such again, and that I can still profit from them, getting toward 70 years later.

And now? I've just started W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, because there it was second-hand and Austerlitz, which Rolando says I simply MUST read, was not there. Moe's Books also provided a fine slipcased two-volume edition of The Tale of Genji in the Royall Tyler translation; I hope it is a good one; perhaps I'll compare it to the others while reading.

Eating and Playgoing in Ashland

tuna-bean salad, Pasta Piatti, Ashland


OUR ANNUAL WEEK IN ASHLAND, with three other couples, eating, going to plays, talking:

Monday, June 18: dinner at Pasta Piatti, an okay Italian, advantageously located on the town's main street, around the corner from the house we rent every year. Here I had a tuna-canneloni salad (the tuna nicely grilled but in two large slabs; deficient in chopped onion) and spaghetti agliiolio. The latter was off the menu: all the pasta courses were too complicated for the evening, but the waiter whispered that he'd give me a child's plate, enlarged and altered to my order. Nice guy!

Tuesday: Toast from that three-kilo boule from Ken's Bakery, and again, but with oil and salt, for lunch. Dinner at Tabu, a "nuevo latino" joint we've liked in the past. A Caesar salad lacking its raw egg, then four nice lamb chops perched on a salad.

Wednesday: dinner at home, because the Tuesday morning farm market provided us with two beautiful fresh enormous porcini. These we chopped and sautéed with chopped shallots (and a few extra ordinary mushrooms) and then tossed with penne. Delicious!

Thursday: a ribeye steak, my first in months, at Amuse Restaurant. We ate here seven years ago when it had just opened; hadn't been back—our recollection having been that it was too ambitious for itself. On second visit our opinion is changed: it's comfortable, with a good menu and an interesting wine list. Expensive, for Ashland, but worth it. The steak was big (12 ounces) but lean (grass-fed) and nicely grilled, with a careful, understated sauce.

Friday: Pizza ordered in from Pasta Piatti (see above).

Saturday: New Sammy's Cowboy Bistro! If there are One Hundred Great Recipes, there are Ten Great Restaurants. New Sammy's is clearly one of them. No website, but plenty of online blogtivity. Surprise: there is a new entry and parking lot: in a few weeks this will apparently become a wine bistrot, possibly open for lunch. Inside, the dining room is reassuringly familiar.

What I had: for white wine, a Provençal white from the Coteaux Varois, a Vermentino called in France "Ronne," soft, delicate, flowery, but with power. Amuse-guele: a small triangle of rye bread with the softest imaginable duck foie gras, a tiny bit of black mustard on it, a home-made griotte (sour cherry pickled in tarragon vinegar) alongside.

First course: noodles (tagliarini, in fact), with asparagus, smoked ham, and tarragon, in buttery broth. Well: when we arrived we greeted Vern, then stepped into the kitchen to say hello to Charlene, to find that she'd just stepped out the back kitchen door toward the garden to pick some tarragon. Let me explain: behind New Sammy's there's a garden; here Vern and Charlene grow their herbs and vegetables—

Second: braised shortribs with spinach, shiitakes, orzo, a green-garlic flan centered in the presentation, rich reduction sauce. Incredibly rich and unctuous; I ate two of the three ribs, sent the other round the table. And here a fine red, Morgon, 2005 as I believe. No dessert, but the others had delicioius things.

What more to say of Sammy's? The garden; the rooms; the feeling of comradeship...

Sunday: dinner at Peerless. It's changed since last we were here, when it was a high-internet presence, organic-oriented, fancy-menu, sustainably thoughtful but not entirely persuasive place which, once it had you on its e-mail list, let you go with protest. Things have relaxed a bit, and I had the best Martini in years here. I asked for it in my usual way: "Cheap gin, good vermouth, three to one, olives, up. Cold." It came not quite cold but correct in every other respect, and when I asked, I was told that the vermouth was Vya. Perhaps so. And later, they sent little tastes of the stuff staight, the dry and the sweet. The sweet was not to my taste, but the dry was much like Boissière: flowery, dry, clear, lacking any bitter chemical flavor.

Afterward, a salad of basil, not quite splendid tomatoes (it's only late June), and unpersuasive "Mozzarella," and then a very good hamburger, rare, on a bun, no distractions. Couldn't quite finish it, but it was good.


OH YES: THE PLAYS. That's why we're here, after all. I've been remiss in reviews from the Eastside View in recent months, because I'm ambivalent about the entire enterprise. So is Ashland: the Oregon Shakespeare Festival used to collect them all into scrapbooks for season subscribers to read in the Members' Lounge, but last year they stopped doing that, apparently at the request of the actors.

After all, the reviewer sees a specific performance, which may have little to do with the one the subscriber sees a week or a month or six months later. The art of reviewing consists among other things of sharing one's individual responses to a unique event with an unspecified number of unseen readers. (Listeners, if you're doing it on the radio; viewers, etc. ...)

The usefulness of reviews therefore lies in the degree to which one knows the reviewer's bias, consistency, knowledge, awareness, and so on. And so reviewing, if it's to be used with any responsibility, requires the reader to spend as much time on reviews as on the material under review. Another step in the direction of quanitities of trivia piling on, and concealing, scattered events. To hell with it. But for the record:

On the Razzle (Stoppard): Fabulous, fabulous, fabulous. The play opened Feb. 18 and closes Oct. 28: imagine how tight the ensemble is! I've heard that at each performance someone throws in some new bit, just to keep everyone on toe. Perhaps. It's unusual Stoppard: pure farce, little intellectual matter. You may know the story as The Merchant of Yonkers, which we saw a season or two ago in Glendale at Noise Within; or as The Matchmaker, or Hello Dolly! even. No matter: this is fresh as paint and funny as hell, and the costumes are fabulous, and it even looks like Vienna. We gotta go back.

The Tempest (Shakespeare): Dangerous, to repeat this show so soon after Penny Mitropoulos's magnificent production last year. That's what I was thinking until just now, when I Googled it, and found that was seven years ago! That's how beautiful and powerful that production was, and one of the "problems" about Ashland is that it has to live with its past successes. Libby Appel has been Artistic Director of the festival for six or eight years, and is leaving, and has directed this as a sort of valediction: unfortunately, as staged in the outdoor theater, it seems to me to have three problems. The Prospero-Ariel-Caliban triangle is never really attended to. Prospero himself seems indeterminate (at the end, for example, he is neither frail nor majestic, but vague). And the musical contribution, especially a long masque with two interpolated sonnets sung by half-nudes who swing upside-down from ropes, is intrusive, irrelevant, and long. Too bad: a magnificent play flawed, though not fatally, in the production.

The Taming of the Shrew (Shakespeare): This went better, with fine costumes and blocking (again, outdoors), clear delivery, good balance between major and ancillary characters, fond and funny local (Padua) color. I'd see it again.

Tracy's Tiger (committee/Saroyan): Some liked it. Not me. Dated, diffuse, symbol-ridden, lightweight. A divertissement has its place, and I don't mind having seen it, but I don't think it'll last.

Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare): A very seriously flawed production, with the elder generation costumed and behaving like Renaissance Italians, the younger one (R & J and their various cousins) like people of our own time, that is the beginning of the 21st century. This made for various problems, as when party music morphed from lute-and-recorder to hip-hop; or when a crime-scene yellow-plastic-police-action ribbon fenced off Mercutio's murder scene.

The cast was wonderful, none better than Mercutio, in fact. But the play was damaged by this "concept," and I wouldn't go back.

Gem of the Ocean (Wilson): The first play in August Wilson's cycle of ten vignetting the African-American experience through the 20th century (though the next-last to be written), this struck all of us as profound, moving, and beautiful. Some found it emotionally draining: to me, it was serene and classical in spite of the injustices and pain it presents. "Live right, die right" and "This is a house of peace" are the two refrains. A fabulous physical production and a perfect cast, with the best use of music I've heard at OSF.

Rabbit Hole (Lindsay-Abaire): we decided later, our friends and us, that people who have lost children, whether to accident, disease, or birth defects, have something in common that people who have not do not. The play is about the grief a suburban family feels after the accidental death of a child, and it would be churlish to impose my subjective response to the play on my readers. A woman's play, perhaps. Not for me.

The Cherry Orchard (Chekhov): The second Cherry Orchard we've seen in the last few years (the other was at Noise Within), this one minimizes sentiment in favor of realism and therefore humor. You know every one of these characters; here, you can enjoy them and then say goodbye at curtain time. The audience was hanging on each line; the cast treasured each character. What can you say: if you like Chekhov, this is truly outstanding; if you don't, what are you doing here?

As You Like It (Shakespeare): Hooray: the week ended on an upbeat. The play started under slight clouds—would it work to set it in Depression America?—but grew and flew and soared from there on, leaving me with tears in my eyes at the beauty and truth and love of the piece. Yes yes yes.

In a few weeks we have to come back for the two plays that haven't yet opened: Tartuffe and the new Distracted. If we can manage it, I'll see On the Razzle, Gem of the Ocean, Cherry Orchard,, and As You Like It again.

So: Four unqualified successes. Two new plays not to my taste but effective and successful to other sorts of audiences. Two or three other plays flawed, one seriously in my opinion, to the extent that I'd advise caution with them.

Those are very good odds indeed, and we'll be back next year.

Eating in Portland

Fried egg and greens, Toro Bravo


NINE DAYS IN PORTLAND but only four restaurants and two bakeries to report—and that in a cursory manner, if you don't mind.

June 9: after Simon's graduation we all went to Lovely Hula Hands (4057 N Mississippi; 503.445.9910; tu-su 5-10; no reservations accepted)—nine of us, across three generations, all gathered at a big table in a comfortable storefront sort of dining room out on trendy but by no means yuppified North Mississip'.

And here I had the best Spaghetti Carbonara I've had this side of Rome. The pasta was perfectly cooked; the pancetta just present enough; the egg exactly the right consistency. Cooked right, this has to be one of the all-time classic Hundred Best Recipes. Here it is cooked right.

June 10: Party all afternoon: cake and cookies and such. Not the best way to nourish yourself, but it's not every year you can celebrate a family high-school graduation. That evening, pizza ordered in from someplace near, eaten in front of the television set. Cubs won.

June 11: Giovanna and Pavel having gone out for the evening, we took the kids to Toro Bravo (120 NE Russell St.; (503) 281-4464; Tue – Thu, Sun: 5-10, Fr-Sat5– midnight, M closed.). The restaurant's website is under construction, but you can read about the place in an online review.

(This website, by the way, is a promising resource for Portland diners, with 75 or 80 restaurant menus at your disposal, and reviews gathering seemingly endless chains of comments. I'm bookmarking it in my Travel folder.)

Here we opened with pinchos, small appetizer dishes: toasted almonds with sea salt; boquerones in what would be called saor in Venice; and bread with butter and olive oil, along with a glass of white. We went on to tapas: "Singing Pig Greens" (some kind of bitter leafy green) with grilled asparagus, chopped eggs and hazelnuts; salt cod Fritters with aioli; more boquerones with toasted bread and piperade; patatas bravas; soft polenta with red and green salsas; tortilla española (which I only now realize is what Dad attempted, sixty years ago, with his "Spanish omelets"); a lamb chop; and memory fails to recall what-all else.

And I have to disagree with many observations on the website above referred to when it comes to desserts. We had panna cotta which I think must be allowed into the Spanish repertoire, and it was first-rate. We had the olive-oil cake and I liked it very much; try the one in Lindsey's book to get an approximation. Simon had the cheese plate; and we all shared ice cream in sherry, a much nicer thing than you miight think and a perfectly appropriate dessert in a tapas joint.

Toro Bravo is barely open, and it's very popular. But it is neither horribly expensive nor horribly loud; just another fine neighborhood destination. Lucky Portlanders.

June 12: dinner at home: pasta dressed with anchovies and olive oil and black pepper. That Hundred Best list will have to be kept in a bottomless box.

June 13: dinner with two other couples at Castagna (1752 SE Hawthorne Blvd; (503) 231-7373; W-Sa 5:30 on). Here Lindsey and I began with zuppa primavera: broth with asparagus, cardoon, peas, spring onion, lardo, olive oil and parmesan cheeese; she went on to sautéed sea scallops with porcini and fennel; I to lamb chops Milanese with an artichoke, fava bean and spring onion salad. "Milanese" here means battered, breaded, and fried, a curious treatment you might think for lamb chops, but delicious.

Desserts? Hazelnut-praline semifreddo with chocolate sauce; dark chocolate, caramel and cashew tart with rum mousseline. State of the art.

June 14: Braised chard and chickpeas at home, then out for desserts at Blue Hour (250 NW 13th Ave.; 503-226-3394; lunch M-F; brunch Su; dinner 4:30-on). Why? Because the new pastry chef, Jehnee Raines, just moved up from Berkeley, where she'd been at Chez Panisse for a while, and she invited us.

We had buttermilk panna cotta with poached rhubarb and cornmeal shortbread ; a triangular passion fruit and strawberry bombe/semifreddo with strawberries; caramel and deep chocolate tartletwith espresso ice cream; jasmine tea sherbet with pearl tapioca and huckleberry coulis; various cookies and candies; and an affogato with very delicately flavored cinnamon ice cream. With them, a bottle of very lightly sparkling moscato; and with the tartlet, as deep and succulent a dessert as I've had in years, Pavel and I shared a glass of Maker's Mark.

I don't often apply the word "decadent" to the act of eating, but I suppose one can make exceptions. Jehnee is a fine pastry chef, and each of these desserts, with their unique plays on the standard repertoire, was well executed, unblemished, memorable.

June 15: Dinner at home: a beautiful vitello rotellino bought at Pastaworks on Hawthorne Street. Veal flank, I imagine, rolled with pancetta; lots of herb flavor; deep meat flavor. Excellent.

June 16: A light supper at home: risotto. Another Hundred Best.

June 17: Lunch of sorts, not that we needed it, in a wonderful little place called The Busy Corner (4927 SE 41st Ave,; (503) 777-5101; 7am-7pm daily, closed 2-4pm for siesta; Friday dinner by reservation only, at 7:30pm). No website; online review here. What a sweet spot: a corner grocery store in a residential neighborhood, turned into a café-lunchcounter-beerandwinebar, with a few provisions still in place—baskets of potatoes and little cabbages and onions; shelves of olive oils and mustards and soups.

Provender is carefully chosen here. The tap beer is the Italian Moretti, a favorite of mine; among the oils was a liter of brass-green oil from the West Bank. This is a workingclass hangout, and if I lived within twenty blocks I'd be there most days.

Then supper at home: sausages and potato salad, for which I made the mayonnaise (a two-yolk one).

IN BETWEEN ALL THESE PLACES we made the usual trips to cafés and bakeries. My love affair with Portland coffees has cooled since Starbucks's purchase and susequent closure of Torrefazione: Ristretto is too bitter; Stumptown too harsh. The neighborhood Torrefazione has been reborn, after a few months as an empty shop, as Segafredo Zanetti Espresso, and it's pleasant enough, and the coffee is decent—not as bland as Illy, though perhaps not quite as personable as Lavazza.

But the bakeries! We get our bread and gibassiers at Pearl; and our cannelés and bread at Ken's. Any city could do perfectly well with just one of these establishments; Portland has both.

Pearl opened in 1997, quickly establishing itself as a major bakery anywhere. This was a little late in the Bread Revolution, which began in my consciousness with Acme in Berkeley and Gayle's in Capitola—bakeries deliberately trying to bring Paris's Poilâne-style levain to the United States. In Portland we'd limped by with earlier Revolutionaries, some still extant: Grand Central and Marsee's are still in business, I think. Pearl swept the aside, as far as we're concerned.

Bakeries are of course individual tastes. Any town no matter how small needs at least two, just as it needs at least two cafés, and for the same reason: competition discourages complacency. Then the town divides between the two. For positive reasons of taste and interest (and, let's face it, economy) or for negative ones like lack of discernment or simple proximity, townspeople gravitate to one or the other. One will always be blander, to my taste; the other subtler.

To make things more interesting yet, each bakery may develop its own little specialty not to be found at the other. This is why we buy gibassiers at Pearl: Ken does not make them. They are little cakes, I suppose, flavored with orange-flower water and anise and very discreet amounts of candied orange peel and dusted with granulated sugar; and they always take me to Nice when I bite into one. They are delicious with tea.

Ken's Artisan Bakery (338 NW 21st Avenue/Flanders; 503.248.2202) came later, maybe three or four years ago. I ran into the owner on Monday when I stopped by for a three-kg boule to bring down here to Ashland, and we had a short conversation. I admire him; you can see why by reading his thoughts On Tinkering and Repetition. His bread is, I think, together with Steve Sullivan's at Acme, the best there is in the United States, unless Joe Ortiz himself is manning the bread oven at Gayle's. (Bread is a living creature and responds to the zen-mind as well as the hand of its maker.)

Cannalés are—well, what are they? Something like popovers, long cooked ones, crisp on the outside, soft inside. They get their name, I suppose, from their method of manufacture: they rise or extrudee or are channeled (canalized) from small individual molds. Lindsey, who should know, says they're hard to make. Jean-Pierre Moullé, one of the co-chefs downstairs at Chez Panisse, always wanted her to make them; they're perhaps a Normand specialty. They are delicious and I know of no other place to buy them.

PORTLAND again

Giraffe riding bicycle, Portland, June 2007

PORTLAND ALWAYS THROWS something unexpected at you. After having spent so many years in Berkeley, this is something we appreciate, Lindsey and I. The unexpected doesn't seem to materialize in Berkeley any more, on our frequent visits there; perhaps we're simply inured to it there; more likely Berkeley has in fact settled into a sort of bourgeois complacency in all its classes, from the homeless to the yuppie. But Portland...

I've often though that if I had to settle in an American city I'd choose Portland, and not only because Giovanna and her family are there. Staying with them, in a bungalow under the heavy trees on Northwest Eighth Street, daily life is calm and friendly; the neighbors are friendly and conversational; a favorite barber shop, the post office, an interesting used book outlet run by the library, a Macintosh specialist, and decent cafés are within easy walking distance.

If we want to go further afield, a ten-minute walk takes us to the free lightrail trip across the Willamette to downtown Portland; a free streetcar takes us further into the new neighborhoods to the north. These free zones aren't huge, it must be admitted; but they break up your walks, give you a rest at the end of the day, and offer protection if it's raining. But it isn't raining, in general, not on our visits—I don't know why that is. Today, like yesterday and the day before, is cool and breezy, its sunlight filtered through high hazy clouds.

We're here primarily to visit, and it's been a special visit, with two commencement ceremonies. Simon, nearly 18, has graduated from high school; Francesca, 14, is entering high school. When I answered the barber yesterday, who'd asked what schools they went to, Boy, the barber said, They sure know how to pick their schools. And indeed we are impressed, Lindsey and I, with these schools—nearly as much as we are with the kids themselves.

Simon's been going to Trillium Charter School, a twelve-year school graduating thirteen students this year. The ceremony was last Saturday afternoon—we arrived just in time, having driven from Grants Pass—and it was memorable. Held in the flag-draped Grand Ballroom of Norse Hall—who knew Faroe Islands had their own flag?—and featuring the school drumming ensemble, which particularly interested us—since Simon is an enthusiastic member. (That's Simon losing his hat in the blurry video I just uploaded to YouTube).

West African drumming, ultimate Frisbee, modular mathematics: those seem to have been Simon's curricular enthusiasms this last semester. On the side he's been busy composing: I wrote about in my previous post here a couple of weeks ago. Alas, the quintet for piano and strings he'd written to be played during graduation exercises wasn't performed; one of the musicians couldn't make the date. Simon took this in stride. What a graceful, good-hearted young man!

A couple of days later it was Franny's turn. She was one of fifty "graduates"—I still can't get used to hearing that word applied to eight-graders, but maturation is clearly no longer on the schedule I knew fifty-odd years ago. Her school is bigger, and a standard public school, not a charter school. But Metropolitan Learning Center is no ordinary school: one of the earliest public "alternative" schools, it encourages a communitarian attitude among its students similar to that we noticed at Trillium.

Here the ceremonies began with another unusual band—eight or ten marimbas, from small trebles to a very deep niine- or ten-key bass, played by kids in all sizes, and played well. Then came the introductions, the teacher appreciations, the certificate awards—Fran being voted "most likely to appear on Saturday Night Live," and it wouldn't surprise any of us if it were to happen: she's pretty funny.

The march of the graduates was not "Pomp and Circumstance," or even the Iolanthe march I recall from my own graduation back in 'Fifty-Two. Instead, the music teacher who'd presided over the marimbas stepped in from the outside corridor, along with another guy on trombone, and they played a tailgate New Orleans-inspired stroll of their own, counterpointing the banter between teachers and students on stage.

* * *

We've been eating at a few Portland spots, in between watching generally satisfactory Cubs games on television, and dipping into the always fascinating books GIovanna and Pavel keep stashed in various corners of the house. But those reports will have to wait another day.

What are we up to?

Tearing down the fallen-down barn


YES, IT'S BEEN a long time. We flew home from The Netherlands May 2; spent a night in San Francisco; spent a night home (first time in a month); drove to Portland for a long week; spent a short week home again mowing and weeding and such; drove down to Los Angeles for our biannual play fix; came home for another week of tending to business.

Portland, for an event that meant a great deal to me. We spent November 2004 in Rome with two grandchildren, Simon and Franny. While there, Simon watched me writing some music using my computer, and got interested. In no time at all he composed a few pieces I thought quite promising -- I put "Stringy", his first piece, on on my website (you'll need to download the "Scorch" plug-in to hear it).

Since then he's stayed with it, and three weeks ago four movements for cello and piano, flute and clarinet, and percussion were played by professional musicians from Portland's new-music group FearNoMusic. It was for me truly an exhilarating experience, and you'll excuse my saying his was by far the most interesting piece on the program. (This is, by the way, a profoundly important program Fear No Music runs; I wish every such group -- certainly the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players -- would imitate it.)

A few days later we celebrated, very quietly, our 50th wedding anniversary. Giovanna and Pavel took us out, to dinner at Heathman, then to LV lounge to hear a couple of our favorites, Dave Frishberg and Rebecca Kilgore, whose laid-back, sometimes romantic, sometimes ironic stuff is just right for any occasion.

The L.A. weekend was mixed. We stopped as always in Ojai to see our buddies Jim Churchill and Lisa Brenneis; they farm tangerines and avocados and were hard hit by the freeze a few months back but are resilient and philosophical and always fun to be with. (You can read more about them in the April edition of Sunset Magazine; and you really should get a copy of Lisa's wonderful DVD about Bill Fujimoto and his (Berkeley) Monterey Market, Eat at Bill's).

We had time for brunch, of course, at Campanile, always a treat. Eggs and Creamed Spinach!

In Glendale, at A Noise Within, we saw two plays. Well, I did; Lindsey decided to come down with tonsillitis and dropped out after the first -- Joe Orton's very funny Loot, fast and sardonic. The spring Shakespeare offering was Romeo and Juliet, a play that always leaves me feeling a little hopeless. Both productions were worth seeing -- in general, Noise Within has kept us loyal, and we'll certainly be there next season: look at the line-up!

Shakespeare: The Winter’s Tale

Beckett: Waiting for Godot

J.M. Barrie: Dear Brutus

Shakespeare: King Henry IV, Part I

Moliere: Don Juan, translated by Richard Nelson

Williams: The Night of the Iguana

Since then, as I say, we've been tending to business, getting together with sisters, Lindsey recovering and getting out in the garden, me trimming the rosemary, thinning the apples, tearing apart the fallen-down barn (okay, with a couple of hired hands).

We have another week, and then it's back to Portland to see Simon graduate from high school, and Ashland for another nine plays... My, how the time flies by!

A few photos from the last month are on my dotmac page

21 "To the Queen!"

Little girl playing the bassoon, Amsterdam

other photos:

April 3-7: Leerdam-Buren
April 7-11: Buren-Ochten
April 11-15: Ochten-Wyler
April 15-18: Beek, Apeldoorn, Amsterdam
April 20-21: Leidsenveen, Amsterdam, Hardewijk
April 23-25: Apeldoorn
April 26-27: Zuider Zeepad

Apeldoorn, May 1--

Her face painted white perhaps against the harsh Amsterdam sun, a little girl of six or seven repeatedly honks out "Frère Jacques" on the bassoon. This is one of the unforgettable moments from this unforgettable day, Queen's Day, April 30, Amsterdam.

It's only one of the musical moments, which also include: an old man with an accordion; two sisters under ten playing violin duos; the Oops-a-daisies singing and playing Country and Western; rock bands at every major intersection; a little-kid rock band (just bass and drums); a woman belting out the blues while standing on the roof of a cabin on an overloaded boat emerging from under the bridge onto the Amstel River.

Kees has a book published by Lonely Planet: Ten things you ought to do before you die. One of the ten is Queen's Day, Amsterdam. I hadn't wanted to take the train into Amsterdam yesterday morning, then back to Apeldoorn late at night, just for a day of festivity, but I was talked into it, and I'm glad I was. Unforgettable.

The train was full but not unpleasantly crowded. Much of the crowd was wearing orange, the Dutch national festive color. The flag may be red, white, and blue -- that justified the American founding fathers in adopting colors which were also, after all, those of the despised British tyranny -- but the Queen's family is the House of Orange, going back to William the Silent, and the country is fond of its royalty. So festivity, here, is colored orange.

Orange hair, orange clothes, orange bunting; orange banners flying alongside the red, white, and blue. Orange balloons. Orange crowns made of felt, paper, plastic, rubber balloons.

Central Station was jammed, a sea of orange. We made our way through as quickly as possible: once outside the station the crowds were easily diverted by traffic barriers onto one or another of three official Queen's Day routes through the capital -- or, if you preferred, any route of your own devise, or serendipity. The trams were not running in Amsterdam's capacious center, nor were any cars, or vans, or any kind of motorized vehicles; not even bicycles.

Every street seemed to be jammed with people, people of all ages. Many of the streets were markets, but markets with a difference -- not commercial, but people's markets; apparently it's illegal to sell anything for more than a couple of euros, and apparently the rule is followed. The city is an enormous sidewalk sale: books, records, electrical appliances, cups and saucers, clothes, lemonade, bric-a-brac, lamps, cheese slicers, shoes, costume jewelry, everything you could think of. A few shops were open, and sold things on the sidewalk in front -- but only things of little value, things they were clearly simply getting rid of.

At one stand we had an impromptu boterham, or sandwich: a slice of bread lightly buttered, shavings of excellent old Dutch cheese, slice of roggebrod, that crumbly, moist, rough rye bread. At another stand, a beer.

The canal quays and bridges were jammed, but when you needed to sit a spell there always seemed to be a café available. People lifted chairs over the crowd to move them from table to table as necessary. May I take this chair, a young woman asks; Yes, but not too far!, is the good-natured reply.

I have never seen so many people in such good humor. The Dutch genius for tolerance and low-keyed enjoyment was everywhere. I thought about the possibility of pickpockets, of course, and I suppose there may have been some somewhere, but crushing though the crowds were -- and you were constantly jostling or being jostled -- there was never a moment of anxiety or unpleasantness.

And this although the beer was flowing free. Heineken, Bavaria, Brand, Palm, Amstel -- the names and logos were everywhere. You couldn't walk a hundred feet, it seemed, without walking past a table where it was being sold -- or, late in the day, simply being handed out. In cans and bottles and above all on tap: beer. It was not a hot day, thankfully, but it was sunny, not a cloud overhead, and the Dutch needed their beer.

(The English and Americans, too: English seemed to be spoken as much as Dutch. When we bought our return train ticket we waited patiently while the counter-lady explained at length, in English, the itinerary she'd just sold a puzzled-looking couple, dark, small, well-dressed. Where were those people from, I asked, when our turn came. Oh, said the ticket-lady, they're French. I hate having to deal with the French; I can't speak it well at all. The French, the Italians, and the Spanish, they're the only ones who come here speaking nothing but their own language. I always wonder, why do you travel abroad, but don't learn another language? Why come to Amsterdam, if you won't learn English?)

All that beer intake implies a consequent outflow, of course, and portable facilities had been set up everywhere, including something I've never seen before, portable plastic pissotières. They looked like dashers in old-fashioned washing machines, two meters tall, cross-shaped in floor-plan, accommodating four men at a time standing with their backs to the open air and peeing into conveniently placed cup-like receptacles molded into the one-piece cast-plastic unit. Where all the stuff went, I have no idea. They're hollow, Cynthia explained; after the center is waist-deep, you have to work hard, against the current.

Maybe: that would explain why, late in the day, you saw men peeing just about anywhere -- against trees, the tires of parked cars, and -- especially -- into the canals. In the evening we took up a station where one of the main canals entered the Amstel, to watch the unbelievable boat trafffic. Big boats and small came through the bridge to our left, entering the Amstel, where they wheeled about mindlessly in an easy-going traffic jam before deciding whether to go upstream or down.

Most of the boats, whatever their size, were absolutely jammed with people, most of them wearing orange. They stood for the most part, or danced,dancing in place mostly. Beer, boats, and crowds, Cynthia mused; a recipe for disaster. But though many of the boats had only a few inches of freeboard, and though boats occasionally nudged one another, and though most of the passengers were standing and may who weren't were leaning out over the water (and often in embraces), no one seemed to go overboard. I noticed that on one boat a couple of very young children were wearing life-jackets -- orange, of course -- no one else had any such protection.

Often a can or bottle or glass of beer would be handed across from one boat to another, and occasionally a glass would be tossed up from a boat to the crowd standing on the bridge, or down from the bridge to a boat. A police-barge was tied up across from us, and a small police-boat occasionally darted among the traffic-jam, but the smartly uniformed officers seemed to have no other occupation than to smile good-naturedly at the crowd, and occasionally hand a glass of beer on from whoever had offered it to them to someone else floating by within arm's reach. On one occasion a small motorboat, its skipper clearly quite drunk, entered the canal against traffic (it was a one-way canal), and a policeman on the barge looked momentarily concerned and disapproving, but there wasn't much could be done about it, and he quickly resumed his good-humored tolerant complacency.

Two things continually came to mind during the five or six hours we walked the streets and watched the crowds. One of them was Pieter Breughel. Except for the fashions and the constant din of amplified music -- for every boat had its generator and loudspeakers -- there was something very 17th-century about the scene. Children's games, adult follies, the wry observations of folk wisdom.

The other thing was Liberty. I doubt there's a better demonstration of total liberty. Everyone seemed to be doing just what he wanted to do, and the entire day of freedom was facilitated by the Government, or perhaps better put by its Administration. Eating, drinking, walking, sitting, dancing, peeing, singing, playing, buying, selling; seven hundred thousand, it was thought, but I would have thought more, were doing nothing but what they wanted, and you never saw a frown unless it was the concentration of a seven-year-old girl playing the bassoon.

We wound up the day at my favorite Amsterdam bar, 't Oude Dock, on Kadijksplein -- a gezellig neighborhood bar whose clientele always seem to know one another, whose bartender is a nice grandmotherly woman in her sixties, I'd say; whose tables are covered with the old-fashioned mohair deep-pile Turkish table-carpets, and whose ceiling is covered with beer coasters. Here I toasted the Queen with an oude jenever en een pils, and the four of us bantered with the regulars; and then we went on looking for a restaurant that might be open; and, finding, none, crashed into a friend of Kees's, a painter who lives with his photographer wife in an artist's loft near the railroad station, a wonderful man who cooked up an impromptu risotto with carrots and potatoes -- I'd never have imagined such a thing, but Kees did, and it was delicious, of course.

And then the last train to Amersfoort, full almost with people mostly in their twenties finally calling it quits on the Queen's Birthday, surprisingly sober and articulate; and the midnight train to Apeldoorn, deserted now -- though this morning's paper says there were 130,000 revellers even in Apeldoorn!